


Beg, Borrow, and Steal All Your Time

by fridaysblues (taemin)



Category: LEDApple
Genre: Alternate Universe - Classical Music, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Conservatory, Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Music School, Gen, YouTuber Hanbyul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-04-01 03:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4004803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taemin/pseuds/fridaysblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hanbyul isn't sure if he can rescue his theory grade and pine over Kyumin at the same time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beg, Borrow, and Steal All Your Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a part of the same universe as [Body Work](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3954790/chapters/8867434), but since it takes place a year before Body Work starts and doesn't feature any of those characters (aside from a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Baekhyun cameo), I've elected to keep it a separate work instead of including it under the series tag.

It's hard to miss the e-mail marked _URGENT!_ from his advisor, but Hanbyul scrolls past it anyway. It's not like he doesn't know he's flunking every class this semester. He's seen the red marks on his papers. 

"Holy shit, dude," Eric intones from over his shoulder. Hanbyul closes the tab and clicks over to his web camera application. "You've got two semesters left. Are you really failing out?"

"Too soon to tell." Hanbyul shrugs. "I'm sure I have to go talk to the department head about it, but."

"What are you going to do?" Eric asks flatly. "You know your dad's going to kill you."

"Yeah, probably. But not today."

Eric nods, but doesn't push the subject any further. Hanbyul's always appreciated that about him—he never wields his authority as a teaching assistant when Hanbyul's obviously feeling sorry for himself. Eric was the first friend Hanbyul ever made in music school, and with the way his grades are going, Eric might be the last one left when he's finally booted from the program. Hanbyul's got to turn things around, and fast. 

Hanbyul pulls his knees up to his chest and holds onto his ankles. It's not a particularly comfortable position to be in, especially on the disgusting old couches in the music building's lobby, but he's long past caring.

"You missed class the other day," Eric begins gently. "Want to tell me why?"

Hanbyul shrugs. "I didn't feel well."

"So when I saw you getting coffee later, that was—a miraculous recovery?"

Hanbyul laughs dryly. "Yeah. Something like that." He doesn't want to say the coffee had been to nurse his raging hangover because he'd been at the club all night checking out the new rock band on campus—he'd heard good things about their vocalist, and the kid hadn't disappointed. He'd recognized a few of the members as music students (most notably the guy at the edge of the stage with the electric cello—Hanbyul'd definitely accompanied his jury a few semesters ago). He didn't know how they'd found each other, but he's caught the fever and now he just wants _in_ … if only he could figure out how.

A short boy with a mop of dark brown curls rounds the corner, speed walking like he's got somewhere he needs to be. His bag is crammed full of etude books and loose sheets of paper. He smiles when he sees Eric.

"Hyung, I'm sorry I'm late—rehearsal ran late again. I swear, if we were union, Maestro'd let us out on time every single time."

"No problem." Eric turns to Hanbyul. "You should practice too."

Hanbyul raises an eyebrow. "You're leaving me right now? In my hour of need?"

"Hey, if someone in my studio asks for extra help, I'm there. You're not in my studio and you haven't asked me for help yet." He gets to his feet and smiles at the boy. "You ready, Baekhyun?"

Baekhyun nods. "I'm really itching to work on the Tchaikovsky, if that's cool with you? I've got questions about the second movement—" and they're gone. Hanbyul pulls over his laptop and looks around. The lobby's deserted. 

He's been video blogging on YouTube since his freshman year at Seoul Arts University. Usually a video of him singing some pop song that's not supposed to be in his repertoire (at least, according to his vocal professor), sometimes just his thoughts on a topic. It's not a religious thing—sometimes he posts two videos a week, sometimes he goes a month without posting anything. He's got a couple hundred subscribers—nothing huge, but a number larger than his graduating class at the University, a fact he feels oddly proud of even when he can't be bothered to get up and attend his classes.

He clicks the record button and squints until he sees the little red blinking light hold steady. "Hey," he says. "Hanbyul here! I know you all missed me, but never fear, I'm back. No song for you today. Just wanted to say… I really wonder sometimes what I'm doing here."

He wrinkles his nose and restarts the recording. "Hi guys, it's Hanbyul. Back again. No song for you this week, just some life advice. You should _always_ go to class, even when you're hungover." He pauses and taps his chin. "I went to a really great show at the campus club this weekend." He licks his lips and thinks about the lead vocalist—some skinny dude with impossibly long legs that hooked around the mic stand every time he leaned in to belt out a line.

Hanbyul wants that. Not—not that he doesn't like what he does, not that he doesn't appreciate the musical theatre training he's been receiving (on his father's dime, no less) but it's just. Not very exciting.

He thinks about the leather pants and swallows the tightness in his throat (and his jeans) away. "They're called _The Blah Blah Blahs_ and you really—should check them out, if you know what's good for you. Super rocking group, and pretty cute, too. I definitely had dreams starring the lead singer. If you can guess what they were in the comments below, I'll sing any song you like." He waves at the screen cheerily. "Bye for now!"

 

 

"Nice of you to show up," Eric says when Hanbyul slouches into the 9AM section of atonal music theory and takes his usual seat towards the back of the class. Hanbyul grunts a reply into the plastic to-go lid of his coffee and sinks low into the desk, eyelids still crusted over and gummy from rolling out of bed fifteen minutes ago. 

The class is maybe half full—a smattering of grade levels, both upper- and underclassmen. Hanbyul doesn't recognize over half of them and he wonders just how many times he's actually _been_ to class this semester.

"We assigned groups last time," Eric says, handing Hanbyul the sign-in sheet for attendance. Hanbyul signs it with a flourish and hands it to the kid next to him. "We'll have to stick you somewhere."

"Groups? For what?"

"Figures you wouldn't even bother reading the syllabus. For your analysis project. It's a decent chunk of your grade," Eric says as the professor comes bustling into the room. "Do well on it and you might not totally bomb the semester."

The professor beckons for Eric to come forward and pass out a worksheet. Eric's a decent teaching assistant, all things considered, although he has this blind spot when it comes to Hanbyul that makes Hanbyul feel a little bad for taking advantage of him. He knows Eric signs his name on the attendance sheet when he's not there and makes sure he's got the notes for the tests, but hey. What are friends for, if not to bail each other out of shitty situations? And by each other, Hanbyul supposes it's mostly him doing the taking. At least 80/20 in his favor.

"You'll be with Kyumin and Kwangyeon," Eric says when he gets to Hanbyul's desk. He lets the worksheet float to the desk and gently pulls Hanbyul's beanie off his head. "I know they're underclassmen, but they know their stuff. Just. Don't fuck this up, okay?"

"Who?" Hanbyul stifles a yawn with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and looks around to follow where Eric's pointing. "I don't—oh, my _God_ , Eric."

Eric smirks. "I might've seen your latest video."

" _Eric,_ I didn't—what did you do?" Hanbyul hisses. The noise disturbs Kwangyeon, who turns to regard Hanbyul with soft, placid eyes. Hanbyul thinks the face is familiar but he can't quite place it. Kwangyeon smiles and elbows the kid sitting next to him a few times until he turns around and stares right through Hanbyul. Hanbyul's throat goes dry. It's—him. The lead singer of _The Blah Blah Blahs_ —Lee Kyumin. His hair's the same bright Elmo-red it'd been the other night, but he seems sleepier without the eyeliner. More approachable. 

If it weren't for the thousand yard stare, at least. He raises his hand without the hint of an expression on his face and swivels back in his chair. Kwangyeon waves his hand to call Hanbyul over and Hanbyul nods weakly. Realization hits him like a freight train: Kwangyeon's the bassist from Sunday night.

"Fuck," Hanbyul says under his breath. Eric chuckles.

"Did you not think—you know people watch those, right? Like, people you go to school with?"

"You dick," Hanbyul mutters, extracting himself from the chair with some effort. Eric pats him on the head and steals his coffee out of his limp grasp.

"Go get him, Tiger. Consider this two favors in one." Eric settles back into his seat and pretends not to notice the pained faces Hanbyul pulls in his direction as he gathers his books and shoves them into his backpack.

"I'm very excited for this project," Hanbyul lies when he slides into the seat next to Kwangyeon. Kwangyeon looks at him skeptically from underneath his bangs but Kyumin, with his messy hair, doesn't even look up from his notebook. 

Hanbyul counts it as a win. 

 

 

The first thing Hanbyul learns about Lee Kyumin is that he's a freshman. Well. Okay. Hanbyul's suffered through worse humiliations than crushing on an underclassman. 

That time he agreed to wear a red dress to a studio recital on a dare, for example.

(Eric was to blame for that fiasco, too. His professor had nearly skinned him alive and hung him up outside of the music building just to make a point about _professionalism_ until Eric took the professor aside and confessed to everything.)

The second thing he learns, watching Kwangyeon's fingers skirt up in the inside of Kyumin's thigh to rest lightly on the fly of his jeans, is that Lee Kyumin has a boyfriend.

 

 

"How could you do this to me?" Hanbyul demands in line at the coffee shop later. Eric looks up from his iPod, confused.

"Ask you to get coffee with me? God. I know. Such an enabler. Who knows what trouble you'll get into after this?" he deadpans. 

"Lee Kyumin is _not_ single, and he's like... a lot younger than I am. Isn't it kind of weird to put a junior with a freshman?"

"Isn't it weird that a freshman is doing better in this class than a junior?" Eric winds his headphones around his iPod and tucks it into his pocket. "Wait, hang on. Isn't it weird that a junior is fixated on a freshman? Seriously. You look at him like he's something to eat. He's a baby." He tips his head thoughtfully. "A baby clown."

"Not anymore I don't," Hanbyul grumbles. "I don't know what I was thinking. He's not even that good-looking up close—"

"Bullshit. I notice you took down the video."

Hanbyul rolls his eyes. "Of course I did. I'm so embarrassed. I'm going to pretend it never happened."

"You had like, six hundred hits on it, or something." Eric turns to the girl at the counter. "Large cappuccino. For here. And whatever he's having, I guess, since I guarantee you he forgot his wallet." He looks at Hanbyul. "You did, didn't you?"

Hanbyul smiles sheepishly. "Thanks. Lemon tea for me, please. With honey." He laughs when Eric raises his eyebrows. "Vocal lesson later. No dairy, or Professor Choi will hand me my ass."

"You think you can unring that bell?" The cash register chimes loudly with the addition of Eric's cash. "Enough people saw that. It's not a huge campus, you _name-dropped his band_ —you think that's not going to get back to him?" He smirks. "How are you going to get through this?"

"I'm over it already," Hanbyul says matter-of-factly, reaching past Eric to accept his mug of tea from the barista. He flashes her a bright smile and winks because _why the hell not_ and she giggles into her hands.

Eric scoffs. "Yeah. You keep telling yourself that one. You know, let's make a bet on it. I bet you can't get an A on this project and keep your little crush a secret from Kyumin."

Hanbyul squints at him over the brim of his mug. "You're on," he says. "What do I get if I win?"

"You get to stay in school," Eric says dryly. "What do I get if you lose?"

Hanbyul rubs his chin thoughtfully. "I still have that red dress—"

"Done."

 

 

The thing is, this isn't an easy analysis project. Hanbyul's never really cared much for theory anyway, but a performance degree comes with a multitude of required theory classes, each one designed to give Hanbyul nightmares. Schenkerian analysis sounds like some sort of weird shit concocted by Mengele, not a useful skill for an aspiring professional musician. But his advisor told him he had to take it, and so here he sits, watching Lee Kyumin nod off in the middle of lecture and wondering why he can't stop thinking about the way he wraps both hands around a microphone.

"Hanbyul."

Someone's whispering at him. He turns—it's Kwangyeon.

"Hm?"

"You free later?"

Hanbyul feels his neck go hot. _Does he know? Is he going to kick my ass?_ "I'm—maybe, what's up?"

Kwangyeon holds up his copy of Chopin's _Nocturne_ and waves it, smile stretching across his face. He's always so damn cheerful. _Stupid freshmen and their optimism,_ Hanbyul thinks. _Stop being cute and enthusiastic. School's designed to break you._

"Oh. Right," he says. "Yeah."

 

 

It gets worse when Kyumin's looking right at him. He knows he should be thinking _motivic structural unity_ and _a-b-a_ form but he's thinking about hip thrusts and the tiny sprinkle of freckles on Kyumin's cheekbones that you just can't see if you're only in the front row of the audience, bathed in neon lights.

"Hanbyul? What do you think?" Kwangyeon asks.

Hanbyul wants to say, _I think I'm a shitty person because you're a nice guy and I'm sitting here thinking about your boyfriend_ but instead he smiles apologetically and says, "I'm honestly terrible at theory, I really don't know. It _looks_ right, but—"

Kyumin scoffs. "Aren't you a junior?"

"That's okay," Kwangyeon beams. "I think I get this stuff. Maybe I'll ask Eric-hyung to look over this before we hand it in. Do you think he will, or is that cheating?"

"I can ask him," Hanbyul says. "He's kind of my bitch."

Kwangyeon laughs loudly, head tossed back. Even Kyumin smiles a little at this, fiddling with his pencil. He's got a bad oral fixation—the pencil's littered with teeth marks, deep ones.

"Good," Kwangyeon says. He closes the score and hands it to Hanbyul with both hands, bowing a little. "Thank you so much. I'm sure we did well, but I just want to be sure."

"No problem," Hanbyul says smoothly. He locks eyes with Kyumin, who stares him down. "Happy to help."

 

 

Hanbyul's room is a disaster when Eric shows up at his apartment later that night. Books pulled from the shelf, papers littered everywhere. He upends the contents of his backpack onto the coffee table and paws through it, whimpering.

"What the hell happened here?" Eric asks. "Lose a phone number or something?"

Hanbyul sits back on the floor and puts his head in his hands. "No. Worse. I lost our project—I was supposed to give it to you to look over, but I don't know where it went."

Eric whistles softly. "Bad luck, dude."

"That's all you have to say? Bad luck?" Hanbyul looks up, scowling. "Are you going to help me look for it?"

"In this mess?" Eric spreads his hands in front of his chest and hunches his shoulders up to his ears. "It'd be easier to find the Holy Grail."

Hanbyul groans loudly into the surface of the table. "I'm so dead. We worked forever on that thing—I'm going to fail, I'm going to have to wear the red dress—"

"When was the last place you had it?"

Hanbyul thinks back and remembers he'd pulled it out to look over at the coffee shop— _fuck_ , it had probably fallen down the side of the armchair. He calls the shop: they haven't seen it, even after he insists they walk over to the chair and search for it while he's still on the phone with them. 

It's gone.

"Fuck," he moans. "I'm so dead. I'm the worst partner ever. I'm going to fail out of the university. My parents are going to hate me, Kyumin's going to hate me, Kwangyeon's going to hate me..."

Eric pauses for a moment. "You're going to wear heels with the dress, right?"

Hanbyul flings a textbook in Eric's direction. It hits him squarely in the crotch. Bullseye. Hanbyul's too miserable to feel satisfied even after Eric grunts in pain and drops to his knees.

 

 

So he gets up early the next morning and sits in the music building lobby, hunched over a fresh copy of the score. He can't quite remember where all the markings go, but it _looks_ alright, maybe good enough to fool Kwangyeon and Kyumin until he can get Eric to help him fix all of the mistakes. The project isn't due until tomorrow, he just _might_ be able to pull this one off.

"What are you doing?"

He jerks backward violently. Kyumin's bent over the arm of the couch, staring at the book in his hands. "Nothing," he says, trying to cover the paper. "I'm—just working on a thing. For a class. Not our class. Another one."

"That's the _Nocturne._ " He puts his bag down on the floor and sits. Hanbyul closes his eyes, trying hard not to watch the way Kyumin's throat bobs when he swallows, the way his red shaggy hair flops in his eyes when he pushes Hanbyul's hand away. "What—why is this blank? What happened to the one we did?"

Hanbyul hesitates just long enough for Kyumin to realize what had happened.

"You're kidding me, right? We worked for _hours_ on that—you _said_ you were going to give it to Eric. What happened?"

"Look, I'm sorry," Hanbyul says, realizing that any chance of looking cool in front of Lee Kyumin has long since flown out the window. "I'm fixing it right now, I'll do all of it over, please don't worry about it."

"Of course I'm going to worry about it! You suck at this, and my grade—"

"Mine _too_ , okay?" Hanbyul's shoulders slump miserably. "I needed a good one on this thing, or the department's probably going to drop me."

Kyumin watches him for a moment, expression as difficult to read as ever. "Let me borrow your pencil, then." He snatches it out of Hanbyul's hand and points at the measure Hanbyul had just been marking. "You're completely off with the cadences."

Kyumin sits with Hanbyul long past lunchtime, helps him fill in the missing analysis in meticulously tiny handwriting in between the staves. Despite his initial outburst, he doesn't seem annoyed by Hanbyul's complete ineptitude with music theory. In fact, he's a pretty decent teacher when he actually bothers to speak when he's correcting Hanbyul's mistakes, even smiles when Hanbyul finishes the last page all by himself with a flourish and doesn't need to erase a single thing.

"Good," he says, rolling the tension out of his neck and wrists. "That didn't take as long as I was expecting it to."

"You should take it. Really." Hanbyul pushes the score in Kyumin's chest and nervously jabs him with it a few times, testing the waters between them. "I'm too afraid to lose it again."

"Look," Kyumin says, stuffing the score into his backpack. "We've got another show this weekend, if you're interested in coming." He smiles, the first real one Hanbyul's ever seen up close from him. It's nice—a little crooked, slack at the edges. Easygoing. "I heard you like us." he says _us_ but it sounds funny with the inflection he puts on it, like he might mean _me_ instead.

Hanbyul blinks furiously a few times, trying to figure out where he could have possibly heard that when he realizes— _oh fuck, my channel_ —

"You've got a decent voice," Kyumin says, breaking through Hanbyul's confusion. "I like your videos. Stop trying to be Bruno Mars, though. Everybody's doing that these days. Try something else."

"My vocal coach says that to me all the time!" Hanbyul doubles over into his laughter and claps his hands together. "I'm not trying to be—Wait." He hasn't done a Bruno Mars cover in six months, maybe more. "How long have you been watching?"

Kyumin shrugs and offers him another smile. "I've got to get to class." He pats his backpack. "This is safe with me. I won't tell Kwangyeon, alright? Our secret."

"Yeah," Hanbyul says, a little dazed. "Thanks. But—seriously, now I'm dying to know."

Kyumin drops a casual, "Catch you later," out of the corner of his mouth and disappears in amongst a cluster of freshmen all rushing to get to class at the same time. So he knows. He probably _has_ known all along. 

The sudden vibration of his phone in his pocket startles him enough that he looks away. There are texts from Eric waiting for him. 

_icu and kyumin getting cozy in the lobby ㅎㅎㅎ_  
i hope the dress still fits u  
i think u shuld wear fishnets 2 

He hurls his phone across the couch and looks down at his hands, wondering if Seoul Institute of the Arts will take a transfer student this late in his career, because he's pretty sure his humiliation is complete.


End file.
